


I Should Live In Salt

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: Quantum Entanglement [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Dead Wives' Club, F/F, Grieving, Mild spoilers up to current (ep. 65), Mildly Implied Sexual Content, Reminiscing, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 06:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11225019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: You're ruthless, Lucretia.But she had to be, to make it this far. And now Maureen and Lucas are dead, and she has lost her family again.





	I Should Live In Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Small exploratory part of Lucretia's grieving process post-Crystal Kingdom arc for Maureen and Lucas to explore some things that (might) not be included in another fic I've been working on.  
> Title from the same song by The National.

There are things that she keeps locked away. Behind magic and metal and an interweaving mesh of thin spun silver and copper that was made when the Bureau was new.

Pass codes and hollow bound books. Secret nooks and double layered safes. Mazes of magic and Dimensional Locks and Private Sanctums cast years and years ago, holy symbols and boughs of wood tied and embellished with misdirection. Spells she created herself, and that cannot be passed by other mages, simply due to the strangeness of them.

In the first layers of her safes are things that people would find normal. Gold and jewels and papers claiming ownership to various odds and ends that she occasionally will extract, seal with wax, and dispense to her people. Letters written in codes to give to recruits to give to Seekers to give to spies. Magical items that are too dangerous to redistribute amongst the Bureau, but aren’t the Relics. These are just kept in a normal, regular safe. She doesn’t care about these things. They are not truly important, just convenient to have. 

A layer deeper, her second office, tucked behind spells and traps and puzzles and an alarm system that's been coded to phrases and keywords and everything she could think of.

Dark tomes of forbidden magic that she’s removed from various libraries. Maps and codes and pictures of the relics that had cropped up around the convenient during the years the relics circulated. Maps and maps and maps, tracing the lines of destruction the Relics have caused, laying out their paths in ink and string. The second Voidfish, tucked safely in its tank where she can visit and entertain it in a vain hope to make up the damage she caused.

A layer deeper, behind her second office: paint. Paints and easels and canvases and broken brushes. Watercolor pots dried and cracked with age. Oils that seeped from their caps and broken stubs of waxy pastel crayons. Ripped paper and balled up sketches and a sense of forlorn abandonment.

And again. Her journals. Her manuscripts. A library of her hand, pages and pages and pages scattered here and there as she tore through them one night as if rereading them would change the past, change the future, if she only found the right clue to where it all went wrong. Anything to absolve them all.

And again. The relics themselves. It was empty, this vault, for a long time. Small and bare and dusty save for the heavy cedar table with the velvet runner she put there long ago. Now three of her friends’ creations rest upon it. First, the Gauntlet. And then, the Oculus and the Sash. And now...

She cups the Stone in her fingers, turning it over and over and over, gemstones falling from her fingers like tears.

They fall and smash against the floor like glass. With the power of it transferred to her staff, it is a meager imitation of what it was. It is small, and it’s power residual, and this innocuous rock was responsible for the loss of the last thing she had left.

She kicks the table the relics lay on, shouting in pain and frustration. She clenches her fist around the Stone and slams her knuckles against the hard wooden surface.

She hears the pop of her knuckles and feels her skin split and it’s not enough, not yet. She does it again. Not yet.

Again. Again, and this time, she feels the break in her fingers, and she feels the Stone cut into her palm and she lets her knees buckle from the pain, banging her elbows against the table.

She gasps, then finally, finally sobs. She hadn’t cried yet, and it had been eating her away inside. For _months_  she had yet to cry and it gnawed on her, dark and insidious and aching.

How could she not have cried? How could she not have been able to cry until she physically damaged herself? How had she managed to be so cruel?

Her heart is a lot like her office, filled with things that don’t matter on the surface. Empty space where everything that mattered the most should have been, but it’s all locked and sealed upon layers and layers of barriers. She has to lock it up to go on. She has to lock up her fear and doubt and just trudge through it.

She’s the only one left and she couldn’t afford to wallow in it all, so she pushed it all into a locked little box in the back of her mind. But she never realized she’d rust over, turn frozen and cruel and unable to grieve.

She touches her sternum with her free hand, the one that’s not broken. She feels the metal through her robes and she reaches in and slips her fingers around the slim band.

"Maureen, Maureen," she cries.

She never gave the ring back. Maureen had never asked for it either, despite taking her own off after that final fight, where Maureen had banned her from the lab and taken her off of the security recognition system. Maybe they both had hoped for a different future than this.

She knows Maureen never wanted a world where Lucas was dead. She probably didn’t want to die the way she had, either. Or lost control of herself and hurt Lucas. Or any of the horrible things that had been relayed to her in real time and from Taako, Merle, and Magnus. 

And she never wanted a future where they were both gone from her, not simply estranged, but gone, beyond her reach.

This surely is her punishment from ripping Lup and Taako apart.  For tearing Lup and Barry apart, too. Retribution distributed without Taako ever realizing, without ever knowing that his creation would be the one that tore her family from her, just like she’d left him alone and without his sister in Faerun. She is so sure that he would be furious with her for ripping Barry and Lup apart, too, that the cosmos has deigned the ultimate irony, that his Stone would take Maureen from her. 

Her family, gone just like that. 

She could have saved Lucas, she’s sure of it.

If she had gone to his lab herself, she could have saved him, she’s sure. She could wield the Relics without harm, and she could have saved him. And she could have seen Maureen one last time... spoken to her one last time before it all ended...

She sent her mercenaries after Maureen’s son. After Lucas. Because she was angry and hurt. Men and women whom she trusted, but would not bat an eyelash at his pain or death. And why should they? Lucas meant nothing to them, and Lucretia meant nothing to them either aside from their employment, so there was no reason to show him mercy or go to any great lengths to save him. He was simply a rogue who went after a Relic and suffered for using it.

They didn’t know what Maureen and Lucas were to her. The ones that did were long, long gone.

She had sent her mercenaries after her own son. Authorized his death in a flush of anger and betrayal. 

She cannot go on. But she must.

Maureen had been right to end it. Maureen had been right, as she so often was. Only this time it wasn’t about the weather or a measurement of components for a tricky spell or whose turn it was to do the laundry or whether or not they thought Lucas actually cleaned his room or invented something to do it for him.

_You’re ruthless, Lucretia. And that scares me._

But she _had_ to be, but that was not what Maureen was looking for. Maureen was looking for a different version of the woman she married, even though the ruthlessness had been in Lucretia all along.

She sits on the floor of her vaults and sobs.

She’s made it. She’s made it this far. Through decades and schisms and Wonderland. Through war zones and recruits who’ve tried to kill her. Through it all. She made it, she’s still alive somehow.

No one is going to recognize how hard it was this time, because it’s a road of her own choosing. But she’s gotten this far!

Four of the seven Relics are in her grasp. She’s so close. She’s so close to being able to save them all!

But, but she couldn’t save them all:

Maureen is dead.

Lucas is dead.

Her family is dead. They died afraid of her wrath and believing she didn’t love them.

She opens her palm, looking at the Stone as it shimmers with her blood. She turns it in her hand.

Sapphire. Clear blue sapphires. She remembers the spells and numbers she has to keep in her mind. Sapphire is the Astral plane. A perfect disk of sapphire, unmarred by occlusions or air. A perfect disk that only the Philosopher’s Stone could provide. 

It spreads in her palm like oil, the circle of sapphire growing slowly over her palm. She focuses. It grows and spins and forms a perfect circle, Maureen and Lucas’ mirrors. Those stupid fucking mirrors that took them from her.

Lights dance across the surface and she thinks in planar physics and arcane figures to open up this connection. She recalls Maureen’s notes, her equations, her extrapolations based on that first mirror before Lucas went out and found the Stone for her.

She can’t bear it. She has to try even though this is the exact thing she damned them for. She can’t bring them back, but she can _see_ them and she can talk to them and she can tell them she’s so sorry, that she loved them even when it seemed like she didn’t. She can’t bear not trying.

It cracks and shatters into a fine dust in her palm and the residual magic from the Stone is gone. It is just a rock in her hand and she is without her last resort.

She throws it away in disgust.

Just like she threw away her wife and her wife’s child.

She rises to her feet, tears still pouring down her face. She wraps her arms around herself and she goes one layer deeper.

The final room in her labyrinthine sanctum is simply a small, circular room. She’s made it into a nest, almost. There’s a chaise she threw a lopsided afghan on. There are pillows too and there’s an old glass of wine she forgot to take out, long stained red from the evaporated drink. She crawls onto the chaise and wraps herself in the dusty blanket and weeps.

It’s filled with her treasures. Not gold or silver or anything else. It’s all junk to anyone but her. A red robe hung on a hook of glass. A crystal that pulses from within. Seashells and sand and rocks, pressed plants and flowers and insects preserved in glass shadowboxes, strange and foreign and unlike anything here in Faerun. A three volume autobiography that makes her laugh in any other circumstance. A patch of navy fabric. A small picture from her original home, where she's young, young, young and grinning with an older woman with her same light hair and dark skin, a letter held up with the Institute’s insignia, her only keepsake from home.

She flicks a finger and summons one of her treasures to her.

A small album. Her most valued possession.

She’d put it together herself. She’d drawn the filigree on the invitations and Lucas had made the printing press himself and Maureen had made an ink that caught the light and turned it all from black to gold in the sunlight for the invitations.

Lucretia didn’t have many people to invite, just a handful of people that would, in time, become her first initiates. Brian, whose death she ordered. Bane, whom Barry had killed for being under the Sash’s thrall and threatening the others. Johann, who she’s sure hates her—but oh, the music at the wedding had been, in her opinion, his very best and her favorite.

Maureen’s remaining family, a few cousins and a few of her late husband’s sisters that she was still close with because Lucas adored them, and a few diplomats who watched out for them during a sticky time, and the cleric that had trained Maureen originally. They had all fussed over her and Maureen, and Lucretia had been sick with nervous fright at the in-laws’ surreptitious whispers until Maureen had assured her that it was just because she’d had paint on her face from the signs they’d put up to the old lab. Whether or not it was true was inconsequential, she trusted Maureen explicitly, and Maureen trusted her. 

They’d gotten married because of Lucretia’s plan, because of Maureen’s insistence to ground them before they became lost in the tide of holding back another war. They’d decided it with ichor on Maureen’s lips and shaking fingers and it was a decision they thought they’d never forget. 

There are flowers and herbs, pressed in the pages. Lavender, for devotion. Myrtle for marriage and love. Rosemary for remembrance. Basil, well wishes. Forget-me-nots, clovers, honeysuckle. Good wishes, happiness, thoughts, and love in their meanings. 

Maureen had picked them all from the garden she never weeded, the garden at the old lab, where she swore up and down she fell in love with Lucretia.

It was summer when they married. It was the fourth summer she’d experienced on this plane and had been summer too when she had fallen in love, not just with the world here, with all the hope it could contain, but with Maureen. She had been weak and scared and half dead, down twenty years of her life when she’d stumbled upon the Millers and they changed her entire course here on this plane.

Maureen and Lucas had given her hope again on her darkest night. They had given her a home and a new family and Maureen gave Lucretia a new resolve to save everyone all over again. Not just because it was right, not just because she wanted for her teammates to live and see the Hunger defeated, to right all those worlds they had wronged, but because this… this was the plane where her heart had lived all along.

She had thought herself lucky to watch a love like Lup and Barry’s unfold. Thought herself lucky to even see something like that, something so rare. And then, and then Maureen.

Though, she wonders, if it was really the same after all. For she had squandered it. She had betrayed them. She hadn’t had the _time_ and she’d stumbled on her own roadblocks.

She turns the pages carefully, hiccupping back her sobs.

She’d painted their wedding portrait too. They sat for another, so Maureen could freely wind her arms around Lucretia and play with the back buttons of her dress and her hair as Lucas looked skyward the entire time, entirely frustrated by his mother’s shenanigans.

But it hadn’t been as good. No one could map the freckles on Maureen’s skin like Lucretia could. No one could catch the endearing crookedness of Lucas’ grin like she could. No one could put elegance to the untamable frizz of Maureen’s dark hair or the way Lucas held his arms when he stood.

They kept it though, and laughed over it. Lucretia looks at the one she painted, and Maureen and Lucas look so alive in it, grinning and laughing and she wishes for a second that she could present this to the world of the recitals and the Voidfish, just so their love could be broadcast to the entire planar system. Remember, remember, remember this. 

They’d never officially dissolved the marriage.

Lucretia traces her finger over the portraits, then the ring. It had been too much trouble to do so, especially because Maureen was too public a figure and Lucretia too private of one.

But the way Maureen’s face had twisted in anger, how her voice had risen. The things she threw at her, test tubes and gemstones that shattered and cracked around Lucretia’s feet as she yelled right back at Maureen, a righteous fury rising up within her that she hadn’t felt in years. The fact she was locked out of the lab when she’d tried to return hours later, her hand throwing up red flags and alarms when she’d tried to scan her way in to try to mitigate the unprecedented damage done in their argument. The things she’d said in retaliation, the accusations they both leveled at each other, all of it… All of it was enough to know. They were over. They were done.

You can love someone with your entire soul, and it can _still_ not work out.

She should have known Maureen wasn’t well, known that something was wrong. Maureen never resorted to agitated violence like that day, would never scream when she could lay out facts in blunt anger.

She knows now that Maureen was ill of mind, knew that she was in the final stages of the thrall of the Stone. If she had opened her eyes, if she had put aside the shocked hurt and the irritation and reluctance to be away from the Bureau, she would have _seen_ , would have thought the words coming from Maureen’s mouth were odd, stilted. Maureen would have never, never, never…

She _heard_ her say the words ‘crystal kingdom’ with her own ears, and she hadn’t realized. She should have realized it then! She knew the cadence in which the Relics spoke, knew the thrall’s darkness and dangers and the way it turned even the most brilliant of minds sour. 

But she hadn’t realized, just thought that Maureen was obfuscating her, exaggerating, and she should have known! She could have saved Maureen, too, just like she could have saved Lucas.

It was the last time she’d seen Maureen, and two months later, Maureen would be dead.

She would die and Lucas would come to the Bureau two weeks later to tell her, to yell and scream and rage at her for not saving his mother, for breaking her heart, for not seeing she wasn’t well or right and for not saving her. For not telling him how to save her, either. He would leave and refuse to tell her where Maureen was buried, or if she even had left a body behind.

_You’re heartless, you don’t give a shit that mom’s dead anyway, so why should I tell you, Madame Director?_

And now he’s gone too, and there are no remains for her to bury, to go grieve at, to lay down her burdens and cry and visit.  

She turns the pages of the album, fingers tracing over the pages of returned invitations with the messages marked with congratulations and that they would come, of course they would.

She had been so nervous the day of the ceremony. Maureen had chased away the family, chased away Lucas, even, and locked them both in the room where Lucretia stood in her slip, staring at her wedding dress in abject terror. She was tying herself to this plane, creating bonds that could not be broken, and she can see them in her minds eye, a tight silver knot that ties her to Maureen so indelibly that Lucretia would stake her life on it. But it's terrifying because she’d only survived this long on Faerun by severing her bonds, by turning her family lose and free and erasing them so that she could save them. Maureen loves her, but Lucretia is  _terrified._

It was against the rules, but Maureen had never cared about the rules. They stayed together the whole morning, and Maureen had calmed her like she was a frightened animal. She’d petted her and laid her down and kissed her slowly as her hands unwound Lucretia so deftly that Lucretia thought she must have been made by Maureen’s hands.

They dressed when it was time, but Lucretia was willing to trade the whole thing, just to lie in the patch of sunlight on the floor, with her cheek pillowed against Maureen’s stomach, soaking up the heat and the softness of her as she traced lines on Maureen’s skin between moles and over the soft pink stretch marks on her lower belly, the ones that make Maureen shiver and laugh when Lucretia’ touches them.

Maureen sat up and pulled Lucretia to her feet, and they dressed each other. Maureen’s fingers did up the ivory buttons up the back of Lucretia’s dress, lips curled in a soft grin.

 _“I was so nervous the first time I got married,”_ Maureen said quietly. _“I kept throwing up, just—the whole time. I was a mess. It turns out I was pregnant with Lucas then, though, so it wasn’t just nerves. But god, I was afraid I would open my mouth during the ceremony and just throw up all over Lucian. So please, Lucy, whatever you do, just don’t open your mouth.”_

Lucretia had laughed at that, because how could she not?

Maureen’s fingers had been gentle at her throat as the last button is done and Maureen guides her down onto the bed, her white slip swirling around her body as she gathered up makeup and combs. She dusted Lucretia’s face with a soft gold and did her lips and braided beads and flowers into her hair. Her lips were warm and soft against her forehead, and they repeated the whole thing.

Lucretia’s hands shook as she tied Maureen into her gauzy dress, so nervous and still so struck with the weight of what they’re doing. She fastened Maureen’s hair back with a bone comb with silver netting, brushed blush and powder over her freckled cheeks and painted her lips rosy pink, fingers soft, then set the golden rimmed glasses back on Maureen’s stately nose, fingers curled against Maureen’s jaw.

 _“You don’t have to say a word, Lucy,”_ Maureen assured her, holding her hand tightly as they both stood at the door, to go out, out to the people Lucretia knows and doesn’t know. _“Not if you don’t want to._ ”

And then… and then they got married. Lucretia hadn’t thrown up, but she’d cried when Maureen put the ring on her, a loud sob because they’d made it, they’d made it this far and they could make it farther. She was sure of it.

She turns the pages, tracing over the scraps of chiffon and lace they’d cut from the bottom hems of their dresses for the album, Lucretia insisting to document it all. She’d said _for the memories_.

She was so sure that they had made it. That they were going to make it. And for a while, they did.

Maureen hung the moon for her; Maureen took her to the stars. Maureen and Lucas helped her gather soldiers, helped her chart maps and create wonderful, terrible spells of protection and warding and helped her put the first few vials of ichor to her recruits lips, helped her draw up the bylaws and the mission statements and Maureen held her when the nightmares became too much.

Maureen held her when she screamed at the red robed figure at the foot of her bed, knowing that Lucretia was terrified of what her eyes could not see.

To this day, Lucretia doesn’t know if Barry really had appeared before her or not. But she set her security up like he really had, and that’s when things began to fall apart for her and Maureen.

Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was work. Maybe it was the Stone. Maybe it was her own paranoia at knowing that despite her efforts, Barry and Lup were out there somewhere and as liches, they _knew_. She knows Barry hates her, and it fills her with a frenzy to make the Bureau work, make it all work out, just to be relieved from that terror. 

Maureen worked more and more on her pet project, in the hopes it would help find the Relics, help turn Faerun towards a brighter future. Lucretia continued to advise against it, knowing what lurked in the planar system and afraid that if Maureen peered at it, it could find them and kill them all. They both hungered for some small victory to justify what they had done, but in that effort to satiate that desire, their marriage began to lack. 

She grew more and more distant. Her soldiers started dying planetside. Some of them fell to the thrall of the relics and she ordered their deaths with hands that shook under the long sleeves of her robes. Lucas did not agree. Maureen could not condemn her enough. 

Lucas called the Bureau a cult. Maureen admonished Lucretia for her cruelty. There were small fights, a clash of wills and inherent tempers. Maureen didn’t think the ends justified the means. Lucretia knew they had to.

They fought using words and charts and clipped gestures, but they were small fires. They would say their pieces and begrudgingly agree that overall, something had to give for good to be done for the world. They would make up.

Until they didn’t.

Until they didn’t, and now they were dead.

Lucretia wipes her eyes and nose with her sleeve, breath shuddering out of her in one long exhale. She sobs on the inhale, unable to quiet. Her hand throbs and she leans forward, pressing her head to the album.

“Maureen, Mar, Mar, I’m so sorry,” she cries. “I failed you both, I wish I did better.”

She sobs until she can’t anymore, her body an aching mass and her face swollen. She gathers the afgan around her, a dusty relic of the old laboratory where she’d briefly made her heart a home and she sleeps surrounded by the treasures of her old life.

When she wakes, she will leave this all behind.

She leaves the album on the chaise, her ring and her stone pendant tucked in its pages.

The door closes behind her and she seals up her heart behind wards and barriers and locks of iron and copper and silver mesh wire.

And she doesn’t look back, because in order to make it, in order to keep going, she has to be ruthless. She has to be heartless.

She has to sacrifice her heart in order to save her remaining family. And that’s something she’s okay with.


End file.
